


milk teeth

by pensee



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Codependency, Embarrassed woobies, Fancy log cabin setting, Hannibal cries a little, M/M, Mommy Issues, Mommy Kink, NO male lactation, Nursing, Post-WOTL, Separation Anxiety, Shaving, Very heavy handed, bearded hannibal, five or six years after series end, front and center, ish, no psychoanalysis needed here, they got one dog
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-13 18:53:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20587364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensee/pseuds/pensee
Summary: Will finds a lovingly created portrait of Hannibal’s mother that seems just a little too telling about the impact she’s had on Hannibal’s romantic interests. This opens a lot of doors that Hannibal is not sure he’s ready for. Compounded by a certain oral fixation, this may be either a recipe for disaster or a chance to bring them closer together.





	milk teeth

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so book Hannibal had a massive thing for breasts. This is that multiplied by a thousand. Been contemplating writing something like this for months but wrote this fic all in one sitting without much editing so here we are.

Picking up assorted details of sketches he’s only seen in passing is easy enough, but it only clicks for him one day in late winter, Hannibal’s unusually forgetful desertion of a piece of used parchment paper on the kitchen counter calling to him like a siren on a rocky shore.

Holding the crinkled paper in his hands, Will lays eyes on her entire visage for the first time in the long years since he’s know of her existence, her son reverently speaking of her only when he felt comfortable to know he had found someone well enough equipped to properly listen.

She had dark, tumbling curls, knowing eyes; politely cold and quietly bristling at the viewer, all at once. Any spark of alarm or amusement that pulses through him is quickly subsumed by curiosity. Simonetta, he remembers her name is.

Will’s never particularly understood the importance of family in his own life—hadn’t wanted the one he’d been born into, or any other, but now he knew that his initial assertions in Hannibal’s office a lifetime ago had merely been bravado masking loneliness. Or maybe the need had never existed until Hannibal had created one. Either way, he senses he is on the cusp of something that was very much going to be related to the conversation they once had.

Stroking the drawing with the tip of his finger, he wonders to himself how soon this conversation will be.

Hannibal never really had grown up, he thinks, making an entire nefarious career of throwing murderous temper tantrums across the Northeast, though the other man looked more the soft old geriatric nowadays than someone he knew could harvest firewood by felling the dying redwoods that surrounded their cabin with a few physically impossible swings of an axe.

A shuffle at the door now, and Will drops the sketch like it’s burned him, hurrying to kick his boots off and make himself look busy at the fireplace. All in vain, probably, since Hannibal will definitely be able to smell the charred parchment paper on him.

He doesn’t know why he instinctively flees from the drawing as if he’s just stumbled upon some sort of shameful pornography (the Hannibal he’d first met back in Baltimore would have balked at the Freudian leaps Will’s mind had just made), but the reality of it is that Will has no idea how Hannibal would react now.

_How do you ask the man you’ve been living with for half a decade whether he’s with you because you remind him of his mother_?

Simonetta Lecter had been dead longer than Mischa had, before the foundations for Hannibal’s Memory Palace had been entirely solid, and so Will would never have expected to see her depicted in such sensual detail.

Could it have been a trick of the light—the rise of a woman’s breast, the delicate clasp of her hands—nothing more than an illusion born of platonic warmth? But then again, neither of them got here for being stupid, save for being stupid for each other, and internalizing his questions about it wouldn’t help, not when asking would easily save such a huge amount of trouble.

“Hi, baby,” he smiles, Hannibal standing in the open doorway, obviously distracted by the endearment (exactly what Will was hoping for), pausing in brushing snow off his coat to gaze lovingly back. Eva bounds in at his heels, skidding to a comically brief stop as her tongue lolls in anticipation of receiving pets.

“You too, baby,” he coos, Eva yipping happily and bolting upstairs to her warm bed after she’s had her share of affection from them both. 

“Hello, darling,” Hannibal greets, unzipping his dog-fur-covered anorak, removing a pullover sweater and gloves, which Will returns to their rightful places, hoping Hannibal is too preoccupied with undressing to notice that he’s shouldering his own coats to return to the closet, despite the fact that he’s already been home for a while.

“How was town?”

Conflicting emotions flit across Will’s features as he tries not to laugh at Hannibal’s chosen attire, long johns and a grey t-shirt with some sort of stain on it, coupled with the inexplicable urge to tamp down the blush creeping up to his cheeks.

_Oh, town? Town was fine, and no, I didn’t waste an extra fifteen minutes sitting at our kitchen table staring at a portrait of your dead mother instead of putting all the supplies away like I was supposed to_.

Fitfully unpacking a few more rolls of paper towels from the bags on the kitchen floor, Will says, “I had to wait an extra half hour or so for the sheriff’s to finish clearing a little fender-bender on Green, but the long way around was worse, so…Um, I may have lost the plot a bit, here.”

He gestures guiltily to the various bags scattered across the floor. “Still kind of out of it after last night.”

They’d been more preoccupied with fucking than any potential hazards around them, and Will had whacked his head pretty good on the wall. Still, he reasons, Hannibal hadn’t told him to worry about being concussed. He hadn’t felt especially sleepy or fuzzy last night, and his pupils had been fine in the morning.

Although, he thinks sardonically, having a concussion might explain the strange, Freudian train of thought his thoughts were currently taking about one Simonetta Lecter.

“I shouldn’t have sent you out. We’re going to the hospital in Preacher’s Peak as soon as—.”

“I’m fine, I’m just—I’m okay,” Will lies, cursing himself for the lack of honesty when he’d not five minutes ago convinced himself to bite the bullet and bring the drawing up. Bring up whatever…observations the sketch held for him, too. It wouldn’t even have to be a big deal—if Hannibal reacted badly, he could write it off as a bad joke—but his stupid brain was too busy making it into something it wasn’t.

“I’m gonna go lay down, I won’t fall asleep, though. Promise,” he says, softer, and Hannibal’s mouth thins behind his beard, but he doesn’t protest further.

Trekking leisurely up the stairs, Will heads to the bathroom instead of the bed, actions following a script his muscles have memorized but his mind has no part in. Looking at himself in the mirror, he sees coarse stubble and the shocking near-pristine white of his sclera in the golden glow of the overhead light. He’s been made healthier, inexplicably, by their trials, no dark circles beneath his eyes or bloodshot capillaries from too much drink. Extra rest, making his own hours, eating things that hadn’t been processed more than the butcher downstairs would allow them to be.

Unpacking their shared straight razor from its place in the cabinet, he lets the sink fill for a few moments before hurriedly foaming his face. Cutting as close as he can, gently as possible starting out around his scar, he studies his reflection again, the only noise the scrape of the blade against his skin and Eva’s sleepy whimpers as she dreams a few feet away.

Then, the faint slam of a cupboard downstairs, and Will sees a clear image of Hannibal moving from the range to the living room, running a hand over the few photographs they have framed on the mantle before reaching down with the andiron to stoke the fire. Eyes glowing orange, like some monster in a fairy tale, beard cast entirely in grey.

There are many more lines on Hannibal’s face this year, it seems, much more than last, and Will wonders what he would look like without hiding behind that dense, almost unruly beard.

_He’s probably had that very same thought about me, once or twice_.

“Dinner will be ready shortly,” comes a voice from behind him, and Will blinks out of his daydream, notices he’s still standing there with the razor in his hand. Glancing at the small clock on the wall, he realizes half an hour has passed. “I took the liberty of putting away the rest of the groceries.”

_Maybe I _should_ go get a brain scan or something_.

“What are you doing, Will,” he says, not really asking as he moves to take the blade from Will’s hand, raising a brow as it’s held back.

“Winter’ll be over soon, and you’ll hate taking care of it,” he says, tugging on the longest bit of Hannibal’s beard, the patch beneath his chin, despite the fact that Hannibal would probably enjoy it, a new kind of grooming ritual to replace pomade and shoe shining in the morning.

Even though he does sort of love the way it looks, it’d grow back soon enough, and he barely stops himself from demanding a haircut to go along with it. If he butchered it by doing it himself, the overall look of it would be too reminiscent of the hack-job Alana had done to him in prison.

“Do your worst, darling. I suppose I’ll just have to wear an extra scarf,” Hannibal sighs, though there is an amused look in his eye at Will holding a potential weapon in his hand.

_Maybe I’m not the maddest one around here after all_, Will thinks, brushing foam onto Hannibal’s neck and the rest, careful with the blade although he knows neither of them would particularly mind if he accidentally slipped a bit.

When he’s done—with too much absentminded petting of Hannibal’s sharp cheekbones for sure—Hannibal’s face and throat are entirely smooth, five o’clock shadow probably on its way soon, but not now.

“Dinner smells burnt,” he says, wrinkling his nose at the charred scent drifting up from downstairs.

“It’ll be palatable,” Hannibal reassures, and, true to form, Will’s eyes nearly roll to the back of his head when he tastes the first bite of venison from his plate, ignoring Hannibal’s smug grin at his success.

After, it’s dishes for him and idly sitting in the living room with a drink in his hand for Hannibal. Wrist deep in suds at the kitchen sink, Will glances over at the opposite counter, where he’d first spotted the sketch of Simonetta, and finds it gone.

Hidden away, maybe, like something Hannibal hadn’t intended for him to see.

We’ll talk about it soon, he tells himself. Just not now.

“I wasn’t aware you had a passcode on your phone,” Hannibal says evenly.

They’re in town again by the weekend because Eva had torn apart all her toys going stir crazy as a storm passed through. Their dentist had just called while they were in the pet store, but Will hadn’t felt the vibration in his coat. Hannibal had been planning to listen to the message that had popped up on the screen, wanted to call back while Will corralled Eva back into the bed of the truck.

Will’s standing closer to the tailgate than the cab, but he can hear the steel in Hannibal’s tone.

Hiding something from me, boy?

“Yeah, it’s 5555,” he says cautiously. “It’s just a stupid deterrent if Darla’s nieces at the shelter try to open another TV-streaming account under my name.”

“Hm,” Hannibal says, Will getting into the passenger’s seat as Hannibal enters the code, lets out a little breath as if he wasn’t expecting it to work, tapping on the phone icon to open Will’s voicemail while pulling out of the store lot.

Eyes fixed on Eva’s smiling face peeking around the edge of the cab in the sideview mirror, Will sighs.

“Okay, I know what you’re saying without you even saying it. I’ll take the code off. You can look through it if you want, I’m not secretly betraying you to the FBI or anything. Those days are long behind me.”

Hannibal snorts.

“No, I’m serious, look through it if you want,” Will says, hating how placating his voice sounds but knowing that Hannibal needs to hear it, nonetheless. What they have now is not about trust; trust didn’t work for them. Some combination of decent communication and needling each other about things that became annoying was how they’d survived up to this point, and Will realized that if it wasn’t broke, he shouldn’t fix it.

Touching Hannibal’s shoulder for a moment, he’s taken aback by Hannibal’s next unexpected confession.

“That fear, however muted, is always present in the back of my mind, but it’s often overshadowed by a larger fear of…abandonment, I suppose, is the best English word for it.”

“Why would I—You think I’m going to abandon you?” Will scoffs, though it sounds insensitive even to his own ears, so far away from Eva’s funny faces in the rearview mirror, this old, dependable Chevy, and the very simple, very safe confines of their new life.

_Well, I only abandoned you for three years, if you count physical distance between us, why would you think I would ever do _that_ again_?

“I have never told anyone this, not even Chiyoh,” Hannibal starts, one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the gear shift. The corners of his eyes are pinched, but not in laughter, and Will’s stomach starts to feel sick. Wrong, he thinks. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

“My mother showed us affection, more so than was required or expected of her station, I suppose, even though we had Nanny to oversee us during lessons and to put us to bed at night. I must have been a toddler when Mother first took me out into the fields—nothing but weeds and lavender, far as the eye could see.

“I was slow at walking, at least at first, and she would tease me about it. ‘Come on, bambino,’ she would say, and back out of my reach.”

“So, you would chase her.”

“I would try. But I would get lost in a crush of weeds taller than I was, stumbling over my own feet while she laughed at me. It was terribly disorienting.”

“She didn’t mean to laugh _at _you.”

“Yes, I know that now,” Hannibal smiles, almost patronizing, and Will feels his mouth twist. There was that old arrogance he’d missed so much.

Trying unsuccessfully the first few times to fit his hand into Hannibal’s, Hannibal eventually concedes to be held as they round the last of the five switchbacks on the main road.

“I ain’t gonna leave you hangin’, honey,” he promises. “If I ever betray you again to the FBI, you’re gonna know beforehand.”

If Hannibal were the type of person to roll his eyes, Will thinks with a smile, he’s sure they’d be rollin’ right on out of his skull.

There’s a delicate balance between genius and insanity, Will considers.

Hannibal’s most basic personality was one that could be easily offended, and Will did not want to push boundaries that would end things explosively for the both of them. Still. Hannibal obviously had issues that were not being addressed, and Will couldn’t just ignore that, despite the fact that Hannibal had so cruelly done the same to him not too long ago.

Growing up alone for so long, having any sense of security baited and stolen by a trick of fate; it was no wonder that Hannibal had gutted him in that kitchen more than a decade ago. He’d thought himself a titan among men, regardless brought to heel and weak as a babe when it came to matters of the heart, things that were never meant to mesh with the preternatural detachment he had worked so hard to cultivate.

“Are you still pouting about the phone lock?” he asks, and Hannibal’s lip curls for a moment before his expression falls completely to blankness. He turns the page of his book and doesn’t look up from it. Unusually silent when they’d walked back into the house, the most engagement Will had gotten was from Eva, who was eagerly winding her way around their legs as if they were playing some fun new game.

Not a new game, Will frowns. Just a variation on the same old.

“You should eat lunch, Will. Eva will come to me if she needs something,” he says, dismissive, and Will’s fingers twitch with the need to do something to make him feel like he isn’t being brushed off like a child, but that’s Hannibal’s issue, not his, so he decides to do the mature thing and take it lying down.

“Fine. Thanks for the leftovers,” he says, though the venison does not taste as good now with this stupid lump in the back of his throat.

“Are we actually fighting? We haven’t fought in _three years_,” Will says, intentionally biting, as he yanks the blankets back and takes some of Hannibal’s prized pillows to his own side of the bed. “There’s nothing to even fight about—.”

“Why didn’t you ask me about the sketch?” Hannibal interrupts, Will narrowing his eyes as he steals a pillow back to his own side. “You clearly wanted to.”

“I—,” Will huffs. “Do you really want to go down this road? You hid it from me by the time I came downstairs, were you afraid of what I—?”

“I went through your phone, while you and Eva were out for your walk. There was nothing to see.”

“I told you that! It’s more than a sketch and a fear of abandonment—oh God, there’s no easy way to ask this—Hannibal, do you want to fuck your mother?”

Hannibal’s mouth snaps shut, and he blinks.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

Something deflates out of Will in that moment—anger, maybe, being replaced by relief. Although he hasn’t answered the question, Hannibal seems genuinely confused.

“No, I’m not going to let you treat me like I’m the crazy one, never again, I told you, and I meant that.

“Look, you draw this excessively gorgeous, idealized picture of a woman that you hide from me after you clearly figured I’d seen it. A woman with a _physical resemblance to me_, and you knew I’d know that. You tell me about your fear of abandonment, that you don’t want me to leave you in the dust like your mother did? You carved a hole into me because you thought I was going to betray you, you never told me how your mother died, Hannibal, did you—?”

The stricken look on Hannibal’s face says it all.

Oh, sweet Jesus. Oh, thank God, Will swallows to himself. He’s not guilty of that evil, at least.

“The fears we form in childhood can last the rest of our lives,” Hannibal says finally, a tremor to his voice that Will has never heard save in his own. “But I assure you, any physical resemblance you may have seen between yourself and my mother is purely coincidental.”

“Hannibal, I—,” Will starts, reaching for him, but Hannibal shrugs his hand off.

“I’ll sleep downstairs,” Hannibal says, just as Eva’s sleepy whimper calls to them from the stairwell. “And I’ll see to Eva.”

“Hannibal, stop,” he says, but Hannibal just ignores him, retreating sullenly, dragging his feet down each step.

_Geez, what a stubborn sonofabitch_, Will groans to himself.

Time, is what would do it. He’d wait, and Hannibal would eventually come back. It was the gravity between them—time and disorder—that drew them back together like migrating birds seeking the shore.

“Fear of abandonment, my ass,” he mutters aloud, though he unfortunately understands how things like this work. People often leave just so they won’t be the ones who are left behind.

Things are usually peaceful in the mornings. Even when there’s a storm raging outside, there’s also a few precious moments while waking when the world seems quiet. Forgetting, for a moment, how they had fought about nothing in particular last night, Will heaves himself out of bed and into the shower, where it comes back to him exactly why neither Eva nor Hannibal are sleeping in their bedroom.

Frowning disappointedly at his insistent morning wood, he lets the water cascade over him and gives himself a careful tug, knowing that whether or not he wants to in this moment, the dopamine release that comes with orgasm, even a lukewarm one, will probably help him more than not.

Or not, he thinks, a few minutes later, washing his diluted semen down the drain, hopping in place to keep himself from freezing.

“Shit,” he mutters to himself, skin pebbling and nipples peaked; the heater was on the fritz again. Shutting the water off with a disappointed groan—so much for a relaxing shower—he steps out of the stall and towels himself off, fending away Eva’s curious nose as she bounds into the room, tail wagging.

“Morning, hun,” he says to her, looking up to see Hannibal already dressed in another sweater and thicker pants than he’d gone to bed in, though his hair is sticking up in a dozen different directions.

“Are you done whining?” Will asks, because it’s best to rip the band-aid off, right?

Hannibal’s mouth twitches. “Not quite,” he says, “but breakfast is ready.”

No matter how angry he still is, Hannibal doesn’t waste any time trying to make his attention less obvious, eyes skating over every uncovered patch of skin. Gaze stalling a bit too long on his chest, Will raises an eyebrow as Hannibal makes a comment about the heater to cover his interest in Will’s half-nudity.

_Huh. Who would’ve thought_? Will muses, looking down at his now-flat nipples.

“I could fix the heater again, or you could just buy us another one. Old man Paige delivers, you know,” Will greets, once things have maybe cooled down again, gingerly sitting down next to Hannibal on their overstuffed, pelt-covered sofa.

“If that’s what you want,” Hannibal says noncommittally, and Will exhales through his nose.

“Okay, never mind, since you made it a point to say you want the direct approach—Do you _like _the idea of being coddled?”

Hannibal looks up this time from the same book as yesterday, with an expression on his face like he’s just been shocked by a live wire.

“Maybe it’s not a ‘Mom’ thing at all, fine. Maybe it’s not even a ‘me’ thing, but I couldn’t help but notice how intently you were staring, upstairs.”

“You’ve always made it difficult not to stare, darling.”

“Stop flirting with me, asshole, you forget I know all your tricks.”

“Which are?”

“Deflection. Misdirection. We both practically wrote the book on every technique. Just tell me, point blank: Do you want to suck me?”

By the dawning realization on Hannibal’s face—that Will does not think this is the furthest thing from possible—it’s clear he knows that Will is not talking about the part of his anatomy that he usually sucks.

Tongue flicking out to wet his lower lip, Hannibal swallows and sets his book down. “Will,” he says, and his accent is thick with something almost like shame.

_Good enough for me_.

“You didn’t even ask me why I’m still wearing a robe in the middle of the day, good for you,” he says, arranging a pillow beneath his back and reclining against the arm of the couch. Untying the flannel belt, he lets the robe fall to his sides and flicks the waistband of the boxers he’s wearing beneath. Voice soft, he asks, “Want these on or off?”

Legs spread, he’s sitting there like an idiot waiting for Hannibal to what—pounce?

“Keep them on,” Hannibal says, finally, and Will stops holding his breath.

He perches awkwardly on his knees before using the arm and back of the couch for balance to lower himself on top of Will, who winces as he gets a bony knee jammed into the meat of his calf.

“Okay, slow,” he says, and his mind is—probably inappropriately—drawn back to their first time together, dick twitching in his shorts at the memory of him saying those very same words.

“Stop talking, Will,” Hannibal says, in a futile attempt to get ahold of himself, though they’re both aware Will doesn’t need any words at all to break him entirely.

The re-growth of his beard scratches against Will’s ribs as he lies against his side for a moment, panting raggedly as if he’s just run a race, hands clutching at Will’s biceps one moment, throat the next, a broad palm spanning Will’s thigh as he mumbles, “Why do you do this to me?”

Will, it seems, has been waiting his whole life to answer, with a smile that’s just a little bit mean, “Because I can.”

Tentative, at best, Hannibal only touches him with his fingers first. Placing the pad of a finger against Will’s areola, Will gasps into a frown as the rest of Hannibal’s fingers close over him and his left nipple is pinched and tugged. Outside of the more familiar realm of sex, it is much more painful, without the chaser of pleasure to ease the way.

“It’s not a wad of dough,” he scolds, joking until he sees the devastated look on Hannibal’s half-hidden face, feels Hannibal’s opposite hand clamp, hard, around his side. “Treat it nice, okay?”

“Taip, mamyte,” Hannibal scoffs, though he is shaking when his thumb glides against the subtle rise of the muscles of Will’s chest. Will doesn’t know what the words mean, exactly, but he can guess well enough, and his own face goes hot at the thrum of excitement that goes through him, toes curling, at the way Hannibal says them.

_JesusJesusJesus_.

Inching up, his chest hair scratching the inside of Will’s thighs, then his belly, Hannibal rests his gut in the cradle of Will’s legs and opens his mouth wide around Will’s left breast, sucking at muscle and nipple all at once.

The teeth that had ended Francis Dolarhyde’s life bite into the meat of him but do not tear, and Will’s more than a little hard in his boxers at the feeling and the sense memory, but he doesn’t move to touch himself or Hannibal any further than to rest a cautious hand along the back of Hannibal’s head.

“Teeth,” he says, and Hannibal purses his lips (only after Will flicks his ear) around them, releasing some of Will’s flesh from his mouth, concentrating mostly on the areola, uncaring for the few scant hairs there.

Chest rising and falling—slower now, that they’ve both fallen into a rhythm—Will tries to focus on what this is doing for Hannibal instead of how much he’s being crushed into the couch, how his lower torso and legs, tingling before now, have gone mostly numb.

The _sound_ is what really gets to him, not so much wet as just loud in the otherwise quiet room. The tiny, high chirps Hannibal’s lips make against his nipple drawing out some memory from him, from a time when he’d been the one sucking half as desperately at a bottle, choking down formula because the real thing hadn’t ever made itself available to him.

_Hard to reach? So is my mother. I never knew her, never knew her, I never knew her_.

What he’d said all those years ago floats into the forefront of his mind like skywriting, and Will leans his head back for a moment and sighs. What a pair they made. Him, becoming a surrogate for whatever this was. Hannibal, looking for something he thought was lost to him forever, constantly hungry, constantly hoping.

“Hey, shhh, it’s okay,” he tells Hannibal, feeling the drip-drip of salty tears on his chest, sliding down to where they’re still connected, mouth to teat.

Because it’s true. It had to be.

“Hey, baby, it’s okay. I’ll take care of you,” Will whispers, sitting up a bit to press his temple to Hannibal’s, his own tension draining from him as Hannibal silently drapes himself even closer, slow, even breaths through his nose tickling at Will’s side.

“Taip, mamyte,” he says in the silence, eyes shining as he brings up his palm to cradle Will’s jaw.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I did this to Elias, so I figured Hannibal needed a little Mama’s boy-ing too. 
> 
> This is the longest single thing I have written in a while, oddly enough.
> 
> @penseeart on Twitter


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